A father of microbiology

Few people have saved more lives than Louis Pasteur. The vaccines he developed have protected millions. His insight that germs cause disease revolutionised healthcare. He found new ways to make our food safe to eat.

Pasteur was the chemist who fundamentally changed our understanding of biology. By looking closely at the building blocks of life, he was at the forefront of a new branch of science: microbiology.

27 December 1822

The artist who became a chemist

Corbis

Pasteur grew up in Arbois, a small town in eastern France surrounded by farms and vineyards.

Louis Pasteur was the son of a sergeant major in the Napoleonic wars who grew up with a passionate love of his native France.

Pasteur spent his childhood in the Jura mountains in eastern France. He was an average student with a passion for drawing and painting. As a boy, he captured his family in a series of lifelike portraits which showed a keen eye for precision and detail. While his teachers encouraged his artistic side, his father considered painting an indulgence: what counted was solid schoolwork. So Pasteur studied hard.

In teaching me to read, you made sure I learned about the greatness of France.

Pasteur recalls his relationship with his father

1848

A startling discovery about the building blocks of life

Science Photo Library

Louis Pasteur aged 20.

Pasteur began a career in chemistry with a post at the University of Strasbourg. He quickly made a ground-breaking discovery.

Pasteur showed that otherwise identical molecules could exist as mirror images (or 'left' and 'right-handed' versions.) He noticed that molecules produced by living things were always left-handed. This discovery was a fundamental step forward in microbiology, underpinning modern drug development and even our understanding of DNA. Aged 25, Pasteur had made arguably his most profound contribution to science.

Pasteur's training in chemistry helped him solve one of the biggest questions in 19th century biology.

For two thousand years, people thought life appeared spontaneously, believing fleas grew from dust, or maggots from dead flesh. Pasteur finally disproved this theory in an elegant experiment. He showed that food went off because of contamination by microbes in the air. He went on to argue that these could cause disease. His 'germ theory' was controversial, not least because he was a chemist not a doctor, but led to the development of antiseptics and changed healthcare forever.

I am afraid that the experiments you quote, M. Pasteur, will turn against you. The world into which you wish to take us is really too fantastic.

La Presse, a french newspaper, shows how radical Pasteur's ideas were in 1860

1863

Invents pasteurisation

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Michael Mosley finds out how Pasteur guaranteed a good glass of wine. Clip from Pain, Pus and Poison (BBC Four, 2013).

Pasteur had made his name with germ theory. Now Napoleon III came to him with a tricky problem facing France's wine industry.

Good French wine was prized around Europe. Yet vineyards were losing money when bottles spoiled in transit. Pasteur realised this was due to contamination, but boiling wine to kill bacteria made it taste terrible. In a series of careful experiments, Pasteur discovered that heating wine to 55 degrees killed bacteria without ruining the taste. This process, later named pasteurisation, saved the wine industry, and cemented Pasteur’s fame. Today, it’s widely used to keep food free from disease.

A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.

Louis Pasteur

1865

Rescues the silk industry

Science Photo Library

A sketch of a silkworm, as seen under the microscope.

Pasteur had saved the French wine industry. Now he was asked to help its silk industry which faced a crisis caused by a mysterious silkworm disease.

The eminent scientist protested he’d never touched a silkworm in his life. Yet he saw an opportunity to investigate the role that microscopic organisms play in illness. He devoted six years to the study, assisted by his wife Marie, who bred silkworms for experiments. He worked out that infection was transmitted by parasites, and showed how infected worms should be isolated and destroyed. His advice meant the silk industry survived, providing another boost to France's economy.

At this point, Pasteur’s career does seem to have been guided by the special providence that watches over a genius.

Patrice Debré, Pasteur's biographer

1868

Personal tragedies

Mary Evans

Pasteur with his son Jean-Baptiste in 1893. Pasteur had five children, but only two survived childhood.

Aged 45, Pasteur suffered a stroke which partially paralysed his left side. Colleagues set up a mobile laboratory so he could work from his sickbed.

This dedication was characteristic of Pasteur, who had thrown himself into work when faced with personal losses. He lived in an age when children often died from infectious diseases. In 1859, Pasteur had lost daughter to typhoid – a disease caused by dirty food and water. In 1865, his second daughter died of the same disease. A third daughter died from a tumour in 1866. Family tragedy framed his fight against illness.

The only thing that can bring joy is work.

Pasteur threw himself into his studies throughout his life

1879

A chance observation in the chicken coop

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Pasteur's work on chicken cholera is remembered in a mosaic in the chapel at the Pasteur Institute where he is buried.

Pasteur’s new ideas about infectious diseases led him and his growing team to study chicken cholera. Here he made another landmark discovery.

After a month away from his lab, Pasteur injected an old culture of bacteria into his chickens. The birds fell ill, but did not die as expected. And now they were resistant to fresh cholera injections. Pasteur realised weakened strains of a disease could help animals develop immunity. A century before, Edward Jenner had found that cowpox protected against smallpox. Now Pasteur had found a way to create vaccines in the lab. It was a turning point in the fight against infectious disease.

1881

Trials a vaccine for anthrax

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A sketch illustrating the symptoms of anthrax.

Pasteur was keen to develop vaccines for other diseases. He turned his attention to anthrax.

Anthrax was fatal to humans, and could wipe out entire populations of farm animals. Anyone who could prevent the disease would not only save lives, but also stood to make money. German doctor Robert Koch had already found the bacteria that caused the disease. Now Pasteur announced he'd discovered a vaccine, and successfully immunised 31 animals – although recent studies of his notebooks have revealed he exaggerated how much original work he did; he'd actually drawn on other people's findings.

1885

Vaccinates a boy against rabies

See how Pasteur used rabbit spines to make a rabies vaccine. From Medical Mavericks (BBC Four, 2007). Contains scenes some viewers may find upsetting.

Pasteur now turned his attention to rabies – a fatal disease with gruesome symptoms which caused a long and painful death.

Pasteur had trialled a vaccine on dogs, but was nervous about testing on humans. He faced a dilemma with Joseph Meister, a boy bitten by a rabid animal. It wasn't certain that Joseph would develop the human form of rabies, but Pasteur went ahead and tested his treatment anyway. Joseph survived. The first human trial of a man-made vaccine was another landmark, although when Pasteur later wrote up his experiments, he exaggerated again, saying he'd done more animal testing than he really had.

1888

The Pasteur Institute founded

Engraving of the first headquarters of the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

People were desperate to be inoculated against rabies. If Pasteur was to satisfy this demand and continue research on new treatments, he needed help.

Pasteur made an international appeal for funds, and set up a charitable body, the Pasteur Institute, whose purpose was to continue research into infectious disease. Work begun by the institute saved many lives. French economic – and colonial – expansion depended on the ability to fight new diseases and new branches of the Institute opened in French colonies such as Senegal and the Ivory Coast.

1888

Pasteur paves the way for eradication of diptheria

Syringe used by Emile Roux. Roux's training as a doctor gave credibility to Pasteur's discoveries.

One of the first successes of the newly formed Pasteur Institute was a breakthrough in the fight against diphtheria - a major childhood killer.

Two of Pasteur's earliest appointments were his former assistants Emile Roux and Alexandre Yersin. The two men identified how diphtheria caused disease by flooding the body with toxins. The work was a key step towards finding a treatment and eventually a vaccine. The fight against diphtheria is one of medicine's big success stories. Today, around 85% of children around the world are immunised. Through the work of scientists such as Roux and Yersin, Pasteur's legacy would live on.

28 September 1895

Pasteur dies

Pasteur's tomb is in a crypt that lies underneath the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Pasteur continued to run the Pasteur Institute in Paris as his health deteriorated. Following another stroke his paralysis worsened. He died aged 72.

France mourned the loss of a national hero. Pasteur was buried in Notre-Dame cathedral. The following year his remains were transferred to a purpose-built crypt in the headquarters of the Pasteur institute. His wife was buried alongside him when she died in 1910. Today, Pasteur is remembered as one of the founders of preventative medicine. The work he began continues to save millions of lives around the world.